Robert Furman dies at 93; oversaw WWII nuclear espionage efforts
After supervising construction of the Pentagon, Furman -- not yet 30 -- was tapped as chief of intelligence on the Manhattan Project, conducting spy missions, recovering uranium, questioning scientists.
Reporting from Washington — For more than 60 years, Robert Furman lived a quiet suburban life as a businessman with a successful building and contracting company.
The engineer had worked on a large construction project as a young man -- few people knew exactly how large -- and built the U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua and hundreds of other structures.
He was a president of the Rotary Club and the Greater Bethesda-Chevy Chase (Md.) Chamber of Commerce and sang baritone in barbershop quartets. He died Oct. 14 of metastatic melanoma at a retirement community in Adamstown, Md., at 93.
Furman obituary: An obituary about engineer and Army intelligence agent Robert Furman in Saturday's California section said he was assigned to the Army's Quartermaster Corps. However, the article should have noted that, during the building of the Pentagon, he was reassigned to the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw the building's construction.
It was only in the past few years, as historians and scholars began to knock on his door, that Furman revealed the full extent of his achievements during World War II and his extraordinary life of intrigue.
He was at the center of two of the most remarkable developments of the war: the building of the Pentagon and the development of the atomic bomb. Yet his roles as an engineer and as the point man in an international espionage operation were cloaked in such secrecy that his name did not appear in official documents for decades.
"You could never imagine a man who was more secretive by nature," said Thomas Powers, a historian who first met Furman in the late 1980s when he was working on "Heisenberg's War," a book about German bomb-building efforts in World War II. "He was the guy who actually handled all this stuff. He was extremely young, and he had extraordinary power."
Robert Ralph Furman, born Aug. 21, 1915, in Trenton, N.J., graduated from Princeton University in 1937 with a degree in civil engineering, eventually working for Turner Construction Co. in New York.
A member of the Army Reserve, Furman was activated in December 1940 and assigned to the Washington headquarters of the Quartermaster Corps Construction Division. He was named executive officer to Clarence Renshaw, a captain in charge of construction of a new War Department office building just across the Potomac River from Washington. Furman had a desk outside the office of then-Col. Leslie Groves, Renshaw's boss.
Furman, then a lieutenant, became a key figure in the day-to-day construction operation that began in September 1941. With 13,000 workers toiling round-the-clock, the enormous five-sided building went up quickly. Furman supervised everything from materials to manpower, even dealing with illicit alcohol sales on the night shift. Every fifth day, he was on overnight duty, making a circuit of the entire building on foot.
